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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Greg Russell on Sound Mixing Dark of the Moon (Updated)

Fifteen time Academy Award nominee Greg P Russell is probably hoping that his nomination for Best Sound Mixing for Transformers: Dark of the Moon will finally give him that much deserved Oscar. In an interview with The Wrap, he discussed a little bit of the sound mixing process for DOTM. Below are a few segments with the full interview here.

Update: The Hollywood Reporter has posted their own interview with the 15 time nominee here.

So other than dialog, just about every sound in these modern action epics is created after shooting?Every sound you hear other than the dialog is all prepared by the sound editing team -- none of that is recorded while shooting the movie. That means all the helicopters and jets, all the gunfire -- every bullet impact and every whiz-by. Plus, all the robot sounds -- and there are thousands of robot sounds to create the life of these beings and make them believable -- are designed and recorded by our sound team.

They prepare the entire palette of sound to be used in the film, then I take all of those sounds and there’s many food groups of them, to work with.

So Optimus Prime, for instance, is sonically much more complex than any human character could be?The robots consist of, say, nine 'pre-dubs,’ where the feet are separate from the big thigh sounds and the big, metallic motor sounds, as well as the medium-range integral movement sounds, that are in turn separate from kind of servo-sourced zipping noises. It goes right down to the eye blinks. All that material is prepared, and then I mix them and pan them across the screen. So if that robot is walking from right to left, those sounds have to be right behind the image.